What's dorkier?

In an effort to own my inner dork, I offer this story:

From 8th grade through 12th grade, I annually attended the Colorado Mathematical Olympiad. Math geeks from all over the state showed up to sit in a room for 4 hours and attempt to answer 6 ridiculously hard math problems. They were so hard that if you managed to get even one right, or you showed your work and they thought you were on the right track to an answer, it was possible that you could swing an honorable mention in the awards ceremony.

I admit that going to the Math Olympiad is dorky. But how's this for dorkier? In all the years I attended, I never even came close to being able to answer any of the questions. I would play at answering them, but really, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. So my senior year, after brief attempts to work out answers to the questions, I decided instead to while away the rest of the test time constructing poems about how hard the math problems were, and why.

Happily, this labor of artistic love was recognized and rewarded by the Olympiad judges when they awarded me the 1997 prize for best literary achievement on the math test.

And just to show how little these die-hard math geeks value artistic vision and inspiration, while the winners of the math test received really nice graphing calculators and scholarships, I won a cheapo pen and a notepad of paper. No wonder the expression is starving artists, not starving mathematicians.